The following History of Fort Hoskins is taken from “ALL QUIET ON THE YAMHILL by Royal A. Bensell, edited by Gunter Barth
The post was established by Company G, Fourth Infantry on July 26, 1856, “in Kings Valley, 0. T. [Oregon Territory ] where the trail from Indian Reservation through the ‘Central Pass’ opens into the Settlements.” The early weeks were filled with a lengthy dispute between General John E. Wool and Captain Christopher Colon Augur over its location. The Fort Hoskins Letter Book records faithfully the captain’s eloquent arguments against removal to a site which the general favored, on the upper prairie of the Siletz River.
While Captain Augur’s military record during the early days of Fort Hoskins does not always match his later achievements in the battle of Cedar Mountain or the capture of Port Hudson, Louisiana, his official correspondence is a compensation. His letters possess literary qualities which place them far above the routine reports of any officer stationed on the Coast Reservation. In his moment of triumph, when General Wool capitulated and approved “what I had done up to that time,” and authorized “me to determine whether the post should be changed from its present location or not,” his style is at its best. “I am gratified at this expression of the General’s satisfaction and confidence,” he informed his headquarters, “and he may rest assured that in doing so I shall be guided entirely by what I conceive to be the best interests of the service.” Such locutions, for which military etiquette usually allows only limited scope, reached even the Surgeon General in Washington, when the Captain attempted to justify “an account of Dr. D. G. Campbell of Corvallis 0. T. for medical services and medicines, furnished to the troops at this post” in August and September 1856. “When my command arrived here,” he explained to Brigadier General Thomas Lawson, they had returned “from an arduous campaign in the Rogue River country.., and many of the men were very much broken down. A too familiar intercourse with some of the friendly Indians during a brief stay at the Grand Round had disabled others—so that medical attendance was imperatively required.”
The argument over the location of Fort Hoskins evidently did less harm to the captain’s career than to the practical value of the fort. Christopher C. Augur lived to be major general during the Civil War, though the public criticism of his decision as a captain remained a constant irritation for the army. In October 1862 B. R. Biddle, Indian agent at Siletz, still cited arguments against the location of the fort in Kings Valley almost identical with some that seasoned the earlier quarrel. “Ill-advised and unfortunate,” J. Ross Browne, special agent for the Department of the Interior, called the choice. He “made diligent inquiry of the principal settlers” and found, “without exception, they regard it as a nuisance, and are opposed to its continuance there... As to any practical protection, they consider such an idea simply preposterous. Expensive quarters for the officers and men are now being built near the present site, which is upon a private claim. I beg most earnestly, in behalf of common sense, that this unnecessary expense may be discontinued, if it be in any way designed to benefit the Indian reservation. Each soul at the agency might be murdered a week before the tidings could reach Fort Hoskins.” Subsequently, Captain Augur conducted a more thorough investigation and found that Browne had interviewed the only one settler opposed to the fort.
Captain Augur’s literary virtues are unacknowledged in Colonel Oscar Winslow Hoop’s “History of Fort Hoskins.” Though based on letters and post orders, Hoop’s account lacks the color of the originals. Source material that he evidently did not use furnishes further details of the life at Fort Hoskins. Lieutenant Sheridan, president of the Council of Administration, recorded in August 1856 the appropriation of $22 for subscriptions to the “Daily New York Herald, Weekly Washington Star, Harper’s Magazine, [and] Blackwood’s Magazine & Reviews.” The mutilated minutes of the Council of Administration do not indicate how long these subscriptions were maintained. Among the sources of revenue for the post treasury, the records mention “the proceeds from the Sale of the Effects of Corporal Bartholomew Boland Company G 4th Infantry, deceased,” and of “Pvt. Conrad Harper Late of Co B 2nd Infy Cal. Vol.” The auctions brought $30.25 and $14.90.
Generally, Colonel Hoop’s history, the only chronicle that rescues one of the forgotten forts from oblivion, is acceptable, though it includes a handful of errors. It records the events down to April 10, 1865, when the fort was abandoned, “this morning at 10 a.m.,” according to the note of Captain Ephriam Palmer, Company B, First Oregon Infantry, on the last post return. A rather amusing mistake, in view of the legend which keeps Philip Sheridan occupied for twenty-four hours a day in the Coast Range between 1855 and 1861, sends Lieutenant Sheridan to Fort Jones, California on May 19, 1857, and adds: “This is the last we hear of Sheridan in the valley of the Willamette and on the Siletz.” Colonel Hoop obviously places too much confidence in Captain Augur’s letter of the same date. Sheridan’s Memoirs and the Post Returns of Fort Yamhill tell a different story. The colonel’s chronicle pays dutiful homage to Captain Frederick T. Dent, who was “casually at Post with his company” in April 1857 and commanded it from July to
November 1861. Though a brother of Mrs. Julia Grant and aidede-camp and military secretary to Ulysses S. Grant, Dent’s role in the story of Oregon forts is rather fleeting.
Fort Hoskins was named after a young lieutenant of Captain Augur’s regiment who was killed during the Mexican War. The heritage of Captain Augur’s fight over the site has obscured its location. In his first post return the captain gives “12 miles west & 6 miles north of ‘Corvallis’ on the Willamette River” as the position, yet for many years the fort was supposed to be west of the Coast Range. Captain Augur’s post return of September 1856 registers the removal of the camp to the Siletz. Since no other report corrected this wise stroke of subaltern diplomacy, it is not surprising that Heitman’s Historical Register incorrectly lists a Fort Hoskins on the Siletz River, “40 miles west of Corvallis,” and carelessly places Old Fort Hoskins on the Willamette River, “6 miles north of Corvallis.” It was 1922 before Professor John B. Horner of Oregon Agricultural College established the site of Fort Hoskins on the Luckiamute River near the mouth of Bonner Creek—